Good read I stumbled upon at work this morning. I guess this has kind of been in the works ever since Bloomberg was in office and now some progress seems to have been made. Who knows just how long it would take and amount of money would be spent but I love the idea of keeping the pay phone booths around and putting them to use again. Free Wi-Fi is always welcomed.

This past spring semester at ODU (and my last one!) I took a course on Web Page and Web Site Design course. For our last assignment we are supposed to give a reflection of the course that describes the course and what we learned. So before the course began I was looking for a final class to add to my electives and came across this class. I only had a little experience in html coding and websites from back in my MySpace days.

We were required to make our own personal homepage, which can be visited at http://bfros001.zxq.net. This was my first website ever made and it was definitely not where it is now. I hadn’t had much experience with the coding so I had some plain boring green type color background. After a few weeks and assignments I gained my footing and was able to upgrade as the class went along. I think by the time the midterm came around I definitely got a good feel for my craft and it felt good seeing my work payoff. That time when you upload your website coding and you see it working online, such a relief and good feeling! Here by the way is my midterm project http://bfros001.zxq.net/midterm.html. I am really proud of how that came out.

I think about the way I went about with the course and I would try to spend more time on the class. I really liked the course and I wish I would of done a little better. My school workload was a bit heavy this semester. I feel like I could’ve done better. I could see a future in web designing after taking this course. I really like the coding part. A couple weeks ago my mom asked me to make her a website for her doctorate program she is currently in. I thought it was pretty cool that I was contributing her success and progress in her program so she could get her Ph.D.

This course changed the way I approach websites. I find myself checking the “show page source code” a lot more. Even the more complex ones are now fascinating looking at all the coding into the websites.

Another aspect of the course was the online portion of it. I liked the assignments where we had to contribute to the discussion board. It kept everyone engaged in the class even with the week off from the face-to-face meetings. And the assignment critiques brought me to website that I would probably never visit in my lifetime, so I thought that was cool and useful critiquing them. It made me think about what others would think of with my websites so I ended up going back to my website and doing some self critiquing which was good for my site I believe.

All and all I really enjoyed this course and I thought it to be very useful for myself now and possibly in the future when pursuing a career. Coding skills I know are a good skill to have in the Information Technology field. I would recommend for everyone to take this course whether or not you’re in a related field. Web designing is fun to do and cool seeing your work on the Internet.

Apple today posted Q2 earnings that beat estimates at $43.6 billion in sales, which illustrates that, while the Americas — led by the U.S. — remains the company’s single biggest market, Asia, led by sales in China, continues to show the strongest growth amidst weakened demand at home and in Europe. Overall, international revenues outside of the Americas were $24.3 billion, or 56 percent of the total for the quarter.

International has been and will continue to be a focus for Apple. Cook cited worldwide smartphone figures from IDC that predict shipments of 1.4 billion units annually by 2016; and tablet figures of 375 million units by the same year, according to Gartner. While the U.S. continues to be a strong market for sales today, much of the future growth in mobile devices will be happening in less mature markets outside of the U.S.

For sometime now companies have managed to integrate social media into their recruiting function. Over 92% have already done so and the number will only increase. These companies are starting to pay more attention to candidates with a good web presence. A good web presence for example is High scores on Klout, number of followers on Twitter, and number of quality recommendations on LinkedIn. The ability to leverage YouTube and Twitter is just beginning of job candidacy. Companies want candidates to be more innovative and creative and these attributes can be found via social networking sites.